I Decide Who Lives Or Dies
by lawnmowerelf
Summary: Sometimes Jarod wonders if he's doing the right thing.


There are times when Jarod wonders if he's doing the right thing. Times when the line between justice and vengeance seems to get a bit too blurry and he can no longer tell just which side of the line he's on. Times when he's just a little afraid that he's slowly becoming no better than the people he targets with his pretends.

Times when he thinks he's enjoying their fear just a little too much.

It's these times when he can understand Kyle just a little better, and while he's grateful for any sort of connection to his late brother, he can't help but worry about the kind of man it's helping him to become. He hasn't caused any deaths with his pretends, but sometimes late at night he's afraid that it's only a matter of time before he takes up Kyle's mantra as his own.

'I decide who lives or dies.'

And sometimes he wonders if he should be doing his pretends at all; if that's the best way to make up for the horrible things he had unknowingly caused at the Centre. If he's really only doing them so he can punish the bad guys, with helping the innocent victims nothing more than a nice bonus. If, at the base of it all, he's really only doing it to punish the Centre itself.

After all, the Centre only continues to chase him because he makes it fairly easy for them to find him. If he really wanted to, he could find one place to stay and completely disappear from their radar. Eventually, they would stop looking for him and let Miss Parker and Sydney move on to other things, things that would be less likely to get them punished by Raines or the Triumvirate.

The fact that he continues his pretends, continues to send Miss Parker and Sydney clues to his whereabouts sometimes makes him wonder if he's really, at the heart of it all, doing everything to punish them. If everything is really meant to punish the people who should have taken care of him, protected him, and instead had used him.

And if it is, he can't help but wonder what it says about him, that so much of his life is centered around punishing a man who should have been like a father and a woman who so easily could have been his sister.

He wants to think that he just doesn't want to lose contact with two of the only people he knew as a child, that he's really trying to give them a chance to escape from the Centre, but he can't quite convince himself that it's true. Oh, that's part of why he does it, but if he's being totally honest with himself part of him wants them to suffer for what they put him through for so many years.

For what they put Kyle through, for separating them for so very long, and for leading to Kyle's death.

If Kyle had been with him, Jarod would have slipped off the Centre's radar long ago, would have found a nice place to settle down and just be with his brother. He wonders sometimes if someone at the Centre realized this and that's why Kyle died. To make sure that Jarod had no reason to disappear before they could catch him.

He tries not to think about that too much, though, because he's terrified of what he might do to the people who took his brother from him if that was the reason why. Because he knows what he's capable of, and that frightens him.

And it's this fear that finally makes him decide that things have to change. Because he knows that if he continues on the road he's on, eventually he's going to go too far. He'll justify what he's done, tell himself that they deserved it and can't hurt anyone else anymore. And after a while, he won't have to justify his actions to himself, because he won't care anymore.

He'll become what the Centre made Kyle, and he doesn't want that.

Instead, he'll find some nice, out of the way place to settle down, become a doctor or a fireman or something, and disappear. Focus his energy on saving lives, and on finally living his own. No more pretends, no more punishing the guilty, no more strange packages filled with obscure clues sent to Sydney and Miss Parker. And maybe, with the hunt for him at a standstill, they'll be able to finally make a life for themselves away from the Centre, too.

And if they can't, then at least he'd tried, and done what little he could to help.

He's never going to be able to have a normal life. Too much happened to him too young for that to ever be a possibility. He's going to have to constantly watch to make sure that his darker side never takes over, that he never becomes a weapon of vengeance like Kyle did. But without the pretends, without always having to look over his shoulder for the Centre, he thinks it'll be easier.

And he can get back to what he set out to do when he first escaped: helping people, and trying to find out just who he is. And it'll be nice to be able to work without constantly watching his back.

Maybe someday he'll go back to the pretends, when he's a bit more settled and not quite so afraid of what he might be becoming. When he doesn't have to worry quite so much about going too far, about becoming judge, jury and executioner.

But if he doesn't, that's all right. There are better ways to make up for what the Centre made him do, and this way he won't have to worry about becoming what they wanted him to be. He can just worry about being Jarod, and that's enough.

And if he sometimes has nightmares where he can hear his own voice instead of Kyle's repeating the mantra over and over again, it's just proof that he's doing the right thing now. And he counters it with a mantra of his own:

'I won't decide who lives or dies.'


End file.
